and, when laid down as the ultimate ground of morality, they become not only empty but doubly corrupting. Huxley's hatred of shams meant the refusal of a brave man to shut his eyes, and scorn of men who deliberately provided convenient bandages for the purpose. His strongest conviction, as he says in the autobiography, was that the one road to the alleviation of human suffering was veracity of thought and action, and 'the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.'
The religion reached from such a starting-point is of course not such as appears to most people to be a religion at all. Yet it is a system of belief which has been enough for the greatest minds. 'The only religion which appeals to me,' he writes to Romanes, 'is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from the best Stoics and something from Spinoza and something from Goethe, and there is a religion for men.' The Stoics, as he says elsewhere, 'had cast off all illusions' and found in the progress towards virtue a sufficient end of existence. He valued even the orthodox dogma for the same reason. He was for Butler against the deists. Theologians had recognised
